Unnotification Returns The Android Notifications You Sent Away

Android users have it easy compared to iOS when it comes to notifications. It is worlds easier to get rid of notifications, including all notifications. Unfortunately, it's also too easy to get rid of a notification accidentally with a misplaced swipe. If you find yourself doing that a lot, then this simple and free Unnotification app for Android might be for you. The only catch is that it requires you to be on Android Oreo. Sorry, still no luck for iOS users.

We've all probably been there, whatever platform you're on. You see an interesting, sometimes even important notification and because of the human frailty, you accidentally swipe instead of simply tapping on the notification. And whatever platform you're on, including Windows, once that's gone, it's gone.

Thankfully, someone at Google seemed to have had enough and decided to do something about it. OK, that's not actually the case. It just so happens that Google added a new API to Android that, for whatever reasons the developer had, recorded a notification that was dismissed and, more importantly how it was dismissed. That is, it can distinguish between a notification that was manually swiped away or automatically removed by the app or other things.

Unnotification hooks into this API to offer the user a chance to undo that notification he or she just swiped away. When a user swipes a notification away manually, Unnotification will pop up a notification with options to undo the action or ignore it. The app also keeps a log of past notifications, in case the last notification wasn't what you were looking for.

Unfortunately, the new notification APIs only got included in Android 8.0 Oreo, so this app will only work on devices with that version. Or to be more precise, Oreo added the ability to differentiate between different notifications dismissals. If Unnotifcation was made to work on older Android versions, it would catch any and all dismissals, which would get annoying and pointless really quick. Unnotification is free on Google Play store. While it does have an in-app purchase, it doesn't unlock anything and is simply a way to tip the developer for making such an app.